2015-08-31 23:53 GMT-03:00 Theodore Ts'o <tytso@xxxxxxx>:
Yes, you can go back to ext3-only. In fact, we do *not* automaticallyYeah!
upgrade the file system to use ext4-specific features.
So it's not just a "you can use ext4 instead" issue. Can you do thatActually, we do guarantee this. It's considered poor form to
*without* then forcing an upgrade forever on that partition? I'm not
sure the ext4 people are really even willing to guarantee that kind of
backwards compatibility.
automatically change the superblock to add new file system features in
a way that would break the ability for the user to roll back to an
older kernel. This isn't just for ext3->ext4, but for new ext4
features such as metadata checksumming. The user has to explicitly
enable the feature using "tune2fs -O new_feature /dev/sdXX".
2015-09-01 16:39 GMT-03:00 Austin S Hemmelgarn <ahferroin7@xxxxxxxxx>:
NO, it is not logical. A vast majority of Android smartphones in the wildExt2 portion embedded and Ext3 many machines.
use ext2, as do a very significant portion of embedded systems that don't
have room for the few hundred kilobytes of extra code that the ext4 driver
has in comparison to ext2.